Lifespan Development: Adult Development and Aging (Life Lab)

Research group: Lifespan Development Lab (Life Lab)

Research area

People need to learn new skills and develop throughout their lives to maintain social inclusion, independence and health. To understand development and learning in older people, it is important to study life circumstances throughout life, including childhood and young adulthood. The developmental paths that a person has taken earlier in life shape their development throughout the rest of their lives, but people's development also continues to change throughout their lives. 

Our research

The general goal of our research is to identify the principles that control development and aging, such that this knowledge can be used to identify ways to improve the opportunities for lifelong learning, a good development during adulthood and aging for all individuals. We study the factors in childhood that predict lifelong learning ability, the challenges that older adults face, and the characteristics of individuals that struggle with learning in older age. Knowledge about these factors, challenges and characteristics are needed to understand lifelong learning but also for the development of interventions to improve learning and wellbeing in later life.

We investigate the genetic mechanisms, behavioral patterns, psychological aspects and sociocultural variables that affect how learning ability, cognitive functioning  and emotional wellbeing changes during aging. We do this in a multidisciplinary way, by using registers, databases, questionnaires, medical and psychological examinations, magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, experiments, and interventions. 

In some studies, the focus is in particular on how sociocultural variables, such as retirement, affect cognitive ability and emotional wellbeing. By following the same individuals over a longer time, we have been able to observe that the retirement transition can mean both increased and decreases socioeconomic inequalities. Most people that retire can handle the transition well. In the short run, it seems like retirement also do not have any appreciable effects on cognitive performance. In related project, the focus of our studies are on how lifestyle factors, such as physical exercise and social activities, affect aging, and how important heritability is for cognitive ability in aging.

The importance of studying conditions during the entire life, including childhood and adulthood, to understand the aging process is acknowledged in much of the research that we do. We have for example show that extensions of the length of education, induced by historical reforms of the Swedish education system, improves cognitive ability. These effects are maintained throughout life and demonstrate the importance of understanding how learning affects development of cognitive ability for understanding also cognitive functioning in aging. Therefore we also take a more experimental approach to understanding learning. In various types of training studies, we investigate mechanisms behind skill learning (e.g., playing an instrument or learning a language) and how learning plays a role in decision making.